Page 106 of Iron Blade

“Eoghan, please…”

“No, Kira! You don’t understand. You’re surrounded by danger, and you can’t see it. I must protect you!”

“No.” My voice was weak, as I trembled, my knees buckling under me. “You are the danger that surrounds me. You are the one that will hurt me. I need to be protected from you!”

I was hysterical and scared, my body pent up with fear and emotion that I had never felt before as tears streamed down my face.

“Please, Eoghan, let me go. You promised you would let me go if I wanted to… you promised…”

His nostrils flared as he came up to his full height. He grew taller as I shrank further into myself, falling to the ground before him until his hands let me go, and I slumped on the ground, my arms covering my stomach- covering my most vulnerable parts from the monster that stood over me.

“I can’t let you go. You don’t understand…”

I shook my head, my hair surrounding me in a sad, funeral veil.

I remembered all those times someone had been taken hostage by the people Paradigm brought down - the criminals, and bastards we spent our lives eliminating. The people we tried to save.

We studied all the ways they pleaded, and all the ways those pleas went unheard. We were supposed to be the people that heard those prayers and answered them. But far from the rescuer in the tail, I was now the useless damsel, but there was no cavalry on the way.

I wanted to go out with dignity, if I had to. I wanted to be proud, like my father, who got to choose his end. But I had no such pride left. I wish I did, but there was something in my belly that made me want to live. It told me that I had to live.

“Please, Eoghan,” I begged, seeing the tear that fell from my cheek and landed on the black and green hem of my dress. “I won’t tell anyone what I saw. I swear it. You know I won’t… please…”

A lie. I reported everything to my superiors. I told my team everything.

Everything except this.

“Kira, I cannot let you go. It’s not safe. I cannot let you…”

He swallowed, his hand combing out his hair, pulling it from its perfectly parted style into something disheveled.

“Kira, it’s dangerous out there, and you’re a target because you’re my wife…”

“You made me a target,” I corrected him. “Please. If you let me go, then I won’t tell anyone anything… I swear…”

He paced away from me toward the door, and I almost thought he’d walk out. I thought he’d leave and let me slip out. I’d leave everything, and maybe he loved me enough to just let me out. Maybe…

But instead, he stopped at the door and flipped the small latch that locked it.

It was such an insignificant and minute gesture. Just a flick of his wrist that made the air grow heavy from the sheer power of his conviction. The man who turned around and looked at me was not my husband. It was not the man who looked at me as I walked down the aisle, and worshiped my body in a small stone cottage at the edge of the woods.

The man who looked at me wasn’t the misunderstood son of Alastair Green.

He was Alastair Green - a man created in his cruel image, looking at me with malice I didn’t know he was capable of.

“You will not leave,” he said evenly, even though each word was laced with acid. “You will stay by my side, wife.” Never had a word sounded more heinous than that. “And in this, you will obey me.” Then a light flashed behind his eyes. Was that a look of regret? “It’s for your own good.”

He turned around and unlocked the door, opening it to the outside world before he shouted down the hall.

“Bourne!” he called out and his little soldier came to his side, peering through the door as he looked at me with lascivious eyes. Eyes that made my skin crawl. “Make sure Mrs. Eoghan Green does not leave this room unless escorted by me, do you understand?”

Bourne looked over to me, his lips coming up at the corner. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Bourne was a man very, very capable of violating a woman, given half a chance and the slightest permission.

“Yes, sir,” he said, with a little too much enthusiasm.

“Don’t enter the room under any circumstances,” Eoghan clarified, grabbing him by the collar and shaking him until Bourne had to pry his eyes from me and to the young prince of darkness who owned me. “Not unless she’s trying to climb out the fucking window. And even then, do not touch her. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Bourne’s brows furrowed, as if confused by the demand. But then he wiggled out of Eoghan’s hold.

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